Investigation of Performance in Integrated Access and Backhaul Networks

Wireless backhaul allows densification of mobile networks without incurring additional fiber deployment cost. This, in turn, leads to high spatial reuse, which is a significant tool to meet increasing wireless demand in 5G networks. Integrated access and backhaul (IAB), where access and backhaul network share the same standard wireless technology (e.g. 5G new radio (NR) standard), allows interoperability among different IAB manufacturers and flexible operation between access and backhaul. This paper investigates joint resource allocation and relay selection in a multi-hop IAB network to maximize geometric mean of UE rates. Our study illustrates several advantages and features of IAB. First, IAB significantly improves UE rates compared to access only networks and can provide an important intermediate solution during incremental fiber deployment. Second, IAB networks with optimal mesh outperforms IAB networks with RSRP based spanning tree both in terms of rate and latency.Comment: Accepted in Infocom 2018 Workshop (mmSys 2018

Broadcasting Real-Time Flows in Integrated Backhaul and Access 5G Networks

This paper studies the problem of broadcasting real-time flows in multi-hop wireless networks. We consider that each packet has a stringent deadline, and each node in the network obtains some utility based on the number of packets delivered to it on time for each flow. We propose a distributed protocol, the delegated-set routing (DSR) protocol, that incurs virtually no overhead of coordination among nodes. We also develop distributed algorithms that aim to maximize the total system utility under DSR. The utility of our DSR protocol and distributed algorithms are demonstrated by both theoretical analysis and simulation results, where we show that our algorithms achieve better performance even when compared against centralized throughput optimal policies